Scott Herring

Associate Professor
Affiliate Faculty in Gender Studies and the American Studies Program

Ph.D. in English, 2004, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
M.A. in English, 1999, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
B.A. in English, 1998, University of Alabama at Birmingham, summa cum laude
B.A. in History, 1998, University of Alabama at Birmingham, summa cum laude

I joined the Department of English in 2007 after three years at Penn State University. My research focuses on modern American literary studies (especially 1914-1945), American cultural studies, and LGBTQ studies as well as subfields such as critical rural/regional studies and material culture studies. I have published three books: Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History (University of Chicago Press, 2007), Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism (New York University Press, 2010; Lambda Literary Award), and The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2014). My essays have appeared in journals such as PMLA, GLQ, American Quarterly, American Literary History, Criticism, Public Culture, and elsewhere. I also serve on the Editorial Advisory Board of Modern Fiction Studies as well as the Advisory Committee of PMLA.

Recent Courses

Undergraduate:

L111 Discovering Literature: Town and Country
L202 Literary Interpretation: Misfits
L354 American Literature since 1914: Gender, Sexuality, and American Modernism
L358 Twentieth Century American Fiction: Modern American Literature and Masculinities
L369 Sexuality and the Post-World War II US Novel
L371 Critical Practices: Sex Across the Disciplines
L389 Feminist Literature and Criticism: Introduction to LGBTQ Studies

Graduate:

L509 How to Write a Scholarly Journal Article
L655 Sex, Gender, and American Modernisms
L742 Regional Sexualities
L752 Queer American Studies in the Long Twentieth Century

Selected Publications (click images for more information)

Books:

The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.

Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism. New York: New York University Press, 2010 (Sexual Cultures series).

Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Edited works:

The Cambridge Companion to American Gay and Lesbian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.

“Out of the Closets, Into the Woods: RFD, Country Women, and the Post-Stonewall Emergence of Queer Anti-urbanism.” American Quarterly 59.2 (2007): 341-372. Reprinted in West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977. Ed. Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.